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Tuesday, September 03, 2013

nano ramblings ....

For the past 2-3 years I've plotted out
a novel in September and never wrote it since some Other Idea hits me
days before nano and I go nuts on that instead. And then get some
other idea, and when the dust clears I have 2 nanowrimo novels done.
Sometimes more. None of which are the novel I plotted out in
September. Such is my brain. This year I am hoping to cheat that by
building up the series of stories called, with a dire lack of
creativity, magician series.
I know a novel can be told in the world: I've had a rough, rough
outline of one in my head for a couple of months now and a couple of
pages jotted out for the start of the story.

(Jay didn't exist
when I wrote those pages, mind. Hell, he still has yet to show up on this blog. Soon :))

I know the setting
can support a novel easily, the trick is going to be keeping the tone
OF the stories and having it not get into too many shades of purple
prose. And of avoiding my default 'voice' for a story, which will be
the real trick. Charlie does come closest to it out of all the
characters, so there is that. And the magician DOES have a name,
which will probably come up in the story. The tangible benefits to
doing a novel are that the neglected families of both Charlie and the
magician can show up (and should). I have a scene with the magician
and his sister in a notebook somewhere I have yet to use that really
needs to show up.

One of the central
tenants of the series is that magicians are uncommon; a key point of
it is in showing why, though mostly in implicit rather than explicit
ways. Much as how magic in it is about small things. Secrets, hidden
desires, and the damages we do to ourselves and others. It's about
the ripples we put into the world, and also the ones we pull back
into ourselves. It's about magic as a poetical construct: it operates
according to need and is driven by desire. And about the ways in
which we channel and constrain desire.

Exactly how the
novel works in those regards will depend on how I tell the story. The
stories thus far have been almost entirely told in present tense.
Which is fine for ~3 pages of prose but I am not sure if the entire
novel will contain that, or even all be from a singular POV. So time
to rummage about inside my head and see what I can pull out .....

2 comments:

Yeah: I did up a blurb today but I'm still not sure how it's all going to mesh together. It's going to be about a duel between magicians but also about the magician (and Charlie) having to return home and face their families. Charlie did after all just up and leave and hasn't been in touch, and it says a lot about the magician that it's never occurred to him to suggest she call 'em :)

And the magician has a sister who is VERY pissed off with him, plus the ramifications of magic done before he left his home town that will come back to bite him. Plus old friends who knew him before he became a magician and simply left will have to try and reconcile their ideas of him with what he is now. It should be a lot of fun to write.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”